


Crust (Find Your Filling)

by orange_8_hands



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Father-Daughter Relationship, Food, Food Issues, Gen, Men of Letters Bunker, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Post-Purgatory, Season/Series 08, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 18:50:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4111330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_8_hands/pseuds/orange_8_hands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the very least, he's gonna feed his kid. (S8 AU where Emma escapes Purgatory with Dean.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crust (Find Your Filling)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [8sword](https://archiveofourown.org/users/8sword/gifts).



> Originally posted back in Jan. on my tumblr [here](http://oranges8hands.tumblr.com/post/109254948858/s8-au-where-emma-escapes-purgatory-with-dean-tw). 
> 
> cw: food/eating issues, mentions of PTSD, (non-graphic) alcoholism, and canonical filicide/whatever the niece version is
> 
> Influenced equally between musings’s [Cat’s in the Cradle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1140688/chapters/2307721) (baby!emmaaaaaa) and my prevalent attitude about the silence around Emma in the Carver Era.

**[now]**

“I don’t get,” she says. It’s silver, which technically matches the rest of the decor, but something about it seems off. A little too modern, a little too new.

“One of the greatest joys in life is burgers and fries, Emma,” Dean says, trying not to notice how far away she stands. Like if she gets too close he’ll slice and dice her. Better than Sam though; she leaves the rooms he enters as fast as she can without making it look like she’s running.

(He doesn’t say:

_you almost killed a waiter at the last diner_.

He doesn’t say:

_driving in the car freaks you out and fast food is too greasy for your digestion anyway_.

He doesn’t say:

_you’re wasting away_.)

“And this,” he adds, throwing his hands out to the personal deep fry cooker the last of his fake credit cards bought them, “is how we do the fries.”

She watches him plug it in, slice potatoes as it warms up and dump them in the vat of oil. She doesn’t make a lot of noise - like Cas that way, small facial features revealing whole books if you can read them, and he’s getting better; learning his daughter, outside of violence, this new person who doesn’t have the emotional capacity to do anything but keep herself in check - but she watches him carefully, how he shapes the patties, slices onions and makes jokes about the tears, adds a little too much pepper because he thinks she likes it better that way. (He’s guessing, but the tilt of her lip after he tweaked the recipe the first time showed promise.)

They eat the fries as the hamburgers cook (he’s still working on timing his meals better) and when she grabs the salt and sprinkles some more on he could cry in relief. Before she finishes the first batch he’s already starting on the second, glancing at the 5lb bag like it may not be enough for the night.

The second batch are eaten slower, and he’s trying to take the advice Benny tried knocking into his head - like he was going to listen to his giant rabbit brother or Cas who never eats on how to handle Emma’s food issues - by not overwhelming her. She liked it, and he didn’t want to lose one of the few things she’d eat by making her feel too stuffed. (He knew that bloated, somehow hollowing feeling too well, but that didn’t stop him from finishing the fries and most of her burger with his.)

She’s starting to lose it, that lightness on her face that only appears a few moments at a time, and so he asks, “Hey, you wanna see what other stuff tastes like if we fry it?”

She tosses him an apple to slice and stick in, though she doesn’t like fruit. His soul cries over the missing pie - and maybe, deep down where the warmth of his mother’s hand resides it really does - but he figures he has plenty of time to turn her around on the subject, once he gets her to like food. (He eats half the apple slices; they basically taste like baked apple). The strawberries get dumped straight into the trash, as do whatever weird green ass shit she got from Sam’s food supply go. (To be fair the strawberries are actually disgusting, but Emma says the green stuff - seaweed? - basically tastes the same.) The pretzels for some reason are a big hit, even though the most he can say is they taste a little like the oil (they got soaked) and maybe a little more crunchier than usual. They spend the next hour doing this, until she starts to get that look that says she needs to be somewhere quiet and dark and closed in or she’s going to lose it.

“We can do more tomorrow,” he says, and she counters, like she’s not really paying attention, like she can disagree and give orders and not be worried about what he’ll do, brushing past him close enough for him to feel the air move, “the potatoes first.” Then she’s gone, and he’s left with a frankly disgusting amount of food that needs to be tossed.

Best purchase ever.   

 

 

**[before]**

He can’t handle supermarkets very well yet. Too much choice, too bright lights, too many _people_ in one place. Cas did something to him, a forehead touch that made something in his mind soften, and he didn’t even technically need to eat in Purgatory (like Hell, his mind shies away from), but he still doesn’t like being in one. He remembers shopping with Ben and Lisa, Lisa keeping to the outer edges of the market while Ben sent longing glances down the snack aisles, sending Dean off on side searches and not saying anything when he came back with a pack of beer along with whatever she asked for.

Supermarkets, gas stations, they’re all set up in the same basic pattern, and he’s learned the one nearest to the Bunker fast. Vegetables, rice, coffee beans, meat… he buys in cash, first from pool hustling and later by what he found in the bunker. There’s classic cars in the garage and he sells one to a guy with bad breath and uglier hair, but willing to pay in cash.

The first few times Emma came with him, stayed in the car and tapped her favorite blade against her thigh, getting more worked up every time they left until the last, screaming in the language of fear Dean’s spent the last few years trying to block from his head. So she stays behind and Dean tries not to feel like shit, like he’s actually running away every time he goes to buy food; he’s not the one who leaves, except for when he is, and Benny’s in fucking Louisiana and Sam is with Amelia and Kevin’s on Garth’s boat and who the fuck knows where Cas is, and there’s a mark on the Bunker wall that burned Emma’s shoulder when she leaned against it, trying to keep space between them like she learned Cas’s lesson backwards.

He gets bags because one of the checkers gives him looks and Emma watches him cook like she wants to make sure he isn’t poisoning her, without quite understanding what that would look like anyways. She doesn’t talk and he takes to narrating everything he does like he’s on a fucking cooking show, and then she doesn’t eat and he eats too much, and then he grabs a bottle and falls asleep clutching it like some fucked up teddy bear.

Parents keep baby albums, or Lisa did, at least, and Dean’s not sure which words count as Emma’s first - when she tried to kill him, when they were both dead, or when they got back to Earth and she whispered “how long until you send me back?"  Benny tells him he’s doing good and Dean tells Benny he’s making it one day at a time and they’re both a crock full of shit, but Benny describes his (however many) great granddaughter and Dean looks up panic attacks because he and Emma keep having them.

She’s sixteen, or a year and a half, and the first time he touched her was to pull her out of the path of a Leviathan and the second time (last time) was when she passed him a gun and she fumbled it from shaking too hard. Just looks at him with his eyes (his mom’s eyes), faintly accusing and mostly scared, and he gets to see the same thing every time he looks in a mirror so he stops looking.

He looks up the recipe, some half remembered thing he thinks he told himself too many times as a kid to be anything but true. Emma crouches by the kitchen corner and looks like he’s been starving her. He cuts and mixes and pours water and stirs the pot on the stove every twenty minutes because even with his kid half-feral there’s something peaceful about the moment. He pours it into two bowls, places them at opposite ends of the table with spoons, and waits. Emma looks more interested than she has since he’s started doing this, cooking like they could be one happy family, and he’s about halfway through before the chair squeaks away from the table and she grabs the spoon like its a weapon.

"What is it?” she asks, voice raw like she spends most of her time screaming and not talking, and he answers back in same, “Tomato rice soup. My mom used to make it for me.”

She only eats half of it before she’s bolting away, but it feels like some kind of accomplishment when he dumps the dishes into the sink.

 

 

**[later]**

Emma and Amelia get along well, which no one was expecting. Charlie is a little too bright and Kevin is a little too focused and Benny is a little too kind, Cas and Dean she could take or leave and Sam she could definitely leave, but she likes Amelia. They leave for a few hours and Dean tries to pretend he’s not pacing by picking up and putting things down, but judging by Sam’s face he’s not hiding it well. Emma still doesn’t like car rides and still doesn’t like humans, and she wouldn’t let him disinfect the cut on her arm this morning, but Amelia can come by and Emma is all smiles. (Ok, small little fluttering ones, and he tries not to track how many because every time her curved lips fall he wants to rip his skin off.)  

Dean makes lasagna, adds an extra layer of cheese because sometimes Emma will eat more if there’s extra, and then green beans and mashed potatoes and a quick version of a cake that means dumping a can of peaches and a can of pineapples because he’s wearing down Emma’s pie hesitation any way he can, even if the recipe calls for cake mix.

Emma and Amelia get back and they all sit down for dinner, Amelia distracting him with flattery over the food and then a story of Sam breaking a pipe in their kitchen. Because Sam is here Emma sits closer to him than normal, and she pokes him when he keeps laughing at the image Amelia paints of Sam with his hair drenched, and she eats almost everything she put on her plate. He stops eating too and he wraps up the leftovers for Amelia and Sam to take back with them in the morning. Emma disappears after clean-up, which is no surprise (the bigger one being she stayed and helped even though it meant turning her back on other people), and Dean grabs a book when Amelia and Sam call it a night early, needing to leave to get back in time for Amelia’s shift the next day.

He keeps reading when he feels Emma’s eyes on him from the doorway, because sometimes she likes to watch him but doesn’t like it when he reacts, but when it goes past the thirty second mark he looks up. She’s still wearing her shoes and knives because if she gets sent back to Purgatory she wants to be ready (“I’ll come get you,” Dean tells her when she first says it, but that’s a level of trust too far), and has a small plastic bag in her hand.

“Hey,” he says, putting the book down.

She fidgets, then glares at him like he laughed at her. “I like Amelia.”

“Good, I’m glad,” he says, and he is, for a lot of reasons but also because that means she’ll be willing to put up being in Sam’s general location.

She walks over and pushes the bag into his chest. “This is for you.”

“Thanks, Emma.”

“Okay,” she says, and abruptly leaves before he can say anything else.

He opens the bag and empties it on his bed sheet. It’s a stuffed bear, eating a jar of honey, with a t-shirt that says “mmmmm good.” He sticks it by the picture of his mom and feels his cheeks hurt from smiling so hard.

 


End file.
